As usual after morning walk I stopped by Ramu Chailwaala’s Gumti (a small shop), for tea and newspaper. Many more ‘intellectuals’, like me held an improvised form of Round Table Conference which in local language we call, “Chai pe Bakaiti” (not so important talk).
The topics of discussion ranged from ‘When will Salman Khan get married’ to ‘Castigation of Government policies’ and most of them useless ‘bhashan-baji’.
Mishra-ji, the retired professor of political science or call him the self-proclaimed President of the conference started the discussion in his Allahabadi accent:
“Agar Netaji desh ke pahle pardhan-mantri hote, to desh ka scene kuch alag hota”, and the discussion continued.
This topic is the talk of the town for past few weeks. There are many conspiracy theories about the mysterious death of Netaji, ones ranging from being killed by Stalin to his re- emergence as Gumnami Baba of Faridabad, post-independence.
Recently there has been a ‘halla-bol’ regarding declassification of files related to the disappearance/death of Bose and allegations against Jawaharlal Nehru of possible snooping Bose’s family after independence. Before getting into these matters, let me give a brief introduction to the lives of the two freedom fighters.
Subhash Chandra Bose was born to Jankinath Bose and Prabhavati Devi. Jankinath Bose was an affluent and successful lawyer in Cuttack. Before joining Congress, Bose had cleared the Indian Civil Services examinations but resigned from it to join the national freedom struggle. During his sojourn to England, he met with leaders and political thinkers like Clement Atlee, Arthur Greenwood and Sir Stafford Cripps.
Similarly Jawaharlal Nehru’s father, Motilal Nehru was an influential lawyer. He was sent to Harrow School, consequently to Cambridge University, and was attracted by the ideas of liberalism, socialism and nationalism.
What was common between the lives of the two freedom fighters was, they both were influenced by western thinkers and had grown up in conditions that was only a dream for a large fraction of Indians. Both of them were similar in status, qualification and started their political career with Congress as colleagues. Then what could be the reason of possible snooping of Bose’s family after his death (at least this was what they believed then) by his former colleague Nehru?
To analyse the situation, we need to take a look at it from another perspective. Another issue related to Bose comes, when it is allegedly said that he wanted India under ruthless dictatorship in its nascent years of independence. This might be true up to some extent and can be substantiated by the following points.
- Bose’s inclination toward Hitler and his Faustian treaty with Nazi Germany.
- In his book ‘ Indian Struggle’ published in 1935 in London, Netaji wrote:
“India needed a mix of fascism and communism”
It so happened, he made a special trip to Rome to present a copy of his book to Benito Mussolini, whose ideas were greatly admired by Bose.
With the above justifications, what can be theorized about the possible occurrence of snooping by Nehru government is:
Nehru was an ardent disbeliever of the ideologies that glorified Fascism and Communism.
Though, as a person he might had utmost respect for his former colleague, what he feared was, his death in plane crash could be a sham and actually a plot to capture power and establish a form of government in India that Nehru was critical of!
While I leave it to the judgement of the readers to decide which form of governance would have been suitable for India, post-independence, what is important here is if indeed, seizing power was Bose’s plan (which is not proved yet), it was correct from the part of Nehru to have snooped the family of Bose. After all, being the PM of a country he would always prefer a form of government that he felt was best for India.
One thing that I am sure of is, had India been under dictatorship in the initial years then the condition of India could have been different in both positive and negative way.
While everything that I’ve said above continues to remain a theory, unless backed by strong evidence. The truth is deeply buried in political archives and can be revealed by declassifying the facts related to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
Till then all we can do is, speculate and say:
“Had Netaji been our first PM, scenario could have been different”.
